Some of you might have noticed odd behavior with the supermegaultragroovy.com domain lately. If you’ve been reading this site long enough, you’ll know that I must be tinkering with the server again!
I’m trying to reorganize the way I serve the site and clean up my server management tasks a little bit, and I’m planning a move to a Dell PowerEdge 1900 soon. I wish I could say I got an xserve, but they’re far too expensive — more than 2x what I paid for the PowerEdge 1900— and I’m not sure I could really deal with learning Mac OS X server on top of all the other stuff involved in the move.
Part of the idea was to move the server tasks off to a set of virtualized servers. This was something I could start doing while I wait for the new hardware to arrive, and all I would have to do is copy the server over to the physical machine once it’s up and running. This is a great idea, in theory, but so far this setup has taken the host server offline twice over the weekend.
Since I was using VMWare Server to achieve my goal, and my host hardware crapped out on me twice, I thought that it might be a good idea to take a look at xen as an alternative. In doing this, I made the fatal mistake of using debian’s apt-get to grab all the packages I needed (because some other things needed upgrading, I just did an apt-get upgrade). In doing this, debian thoughtfully upgraded my php install to php5.2, which FogBugz doesn’t support.
This is not the first time that debian bit me like this. I had some trouble earlier because I required python 2.4 for a web application project I was working on using TurboGears, and debian was stuck on 2.3 still. I vowed to switch distributions once I got some new hardware, and I have my sights set on ubuntu in the meantime.
So, to make a long story short, you can expect the site to be a little shaky for a bit as I move to new hardware. I hope to have things operating as they did before ASAP, and I don’t plan to do anything to disrupt the existing hardware until I get the new box.
February 5th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Chris - why don’t You take in to a hotel and stop worrying about HW etc. I suppose You will save a dime or two also!
All the best /JG
February 5th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Even if I took it to a colocation facility, I still have to worry about hardware, and it will cost me way more money in the end!
Besides, this is all part of the hobby. As much as it can annoy me, it’s fun to learn and understand this stuff as I go along.
Why do we bother building our own speakers and amps? I’m a DIY guy to the core. :)